This is the work that I intend on accomplishing during the period mentioned above. My primary objective is filling in blanks in my productive use of language. Although I passed the CILS C1 exam, I did not do so with the kinds of marks that I expected which I think reveals that I have a number of areas where my knowledge of the the language is broad but my grasp of that knowledge is insufficiently stable to say that I am operating clearly at C1 level. To give an example of what I mean, I could explain to a beginner the rules of the imperative in Italian but when I do my Anki cards on this structure the answers do not come to me automatically. That’s just inexcusable for someone at my level in the language. Even though I am never in positions where I am forced to use the imperative, I should know it by now.

During this sprint I completed a chapter in Nuovo Magari, 4 exercises in 202 Esercizi C1/C2, and a chapter in Comunicare in Italiano. I also listened to a lecture on the barbarian invasion of Rome (more than an hour long) and read an article in Focus Storia on ancient Rome. I did not do the writing that I wanted in this time period. I wanted to complete two chapters in Nuovo Magari and hope to still be able to accomplish this in my down time this week since it’s a holiday. Though, strictly speaking, I should not be doing that and should just save it for the next sprint.

Things I need to start doing

The number on thing is watching more TV programs in Italian. I believe that this is really the best way to get more advanced input. Reading, even reading complicated things is far too easy for me. As is listening too audiobooks. I don’t have any problems, generally watching TV in Italian, but there are certain programs that represent a challenge to me. Rocco Schiavone is an example. The eponymous character is really hard for me too understand. And it’s almost like he’s just mumbling me. There are times in the dialog where I am left uncertain if he said something that was intentionally obscured by the director or writers. But I’m fairly sure it’s just me. On the other hand, I don’t have this issue with any of the other characters in the show.

I also believe that I need to start recording my sessions again and actually review them.

Things I need to stop doing

I need to stop working during my lunch period and focus my time during the week on learning. It’s easy when I have an iTalki lesson but if I am working on something interesting, I frequently tend to continue working on it and skip the time I should be setting aside to learning. I am also getting way too distracted on weekends.

Things I need to continue doing

I’m not bad at getting the work done that I have set for myself if I actually sit down to do it. My sessions are, I believe, at the correct level for myself. I’m able to get my new material into Anki within a reasonable time frame and still keep the number of cards to a reasonable level. This is a difficult balancing act. I don’t feel that I can handle reviewing more than 60 cards per day, so the number of card that I add is a big factor in managing my review of grammar and new vocabulary.

Regarding specifically the C1 and C2 exams, one thing that I have learned from doing so many of the practice exams is that prova n 3 is the most difficult for me but there are always 6 answers that need to be selected from the available options in this exam and it seems to have been this way for at least a decade. So, if you are finding this exam to be a little difficult, knowing that there are only six correct options may help you narrow down the correct ones. I'm not quite certain if this type of test exists in the B levels.

Here are the exams that the person mentioned above has uploaded thus far for the C levels.

Well, I passed. I’m not going to post my score because I am not proud of it. I’ve decided that since I now have a much better example of what I need to do to pass the C2, I am going to go for in in June of 2019 or perhaps December of 2019. It depends on my schedule. We have a family trip scheduled for March, so there could be some interruptions that prevent my taking the exam in Summer.

All-in-all, the experience was very worthwhile. In my preparation for the exam I really pushed my skills to the next level and I think that I can replicate those results in a more systematized manner now. Being a self-directed learner is hard work. It’s not so much the learning that is difficult either. Maintaining your motivation and making sure that you are working on the things that will have the most impact on your productive skills is far harder than the actual studying/learning. But, I believe that I have found a system that I can both maintain consistently and that provides me with the maximum amount of value from the learning perspective.

That being said, I still find it hard to integrate all of my languages into my learning, though. Ideally, I should be doing a little of each every day. But my time is so filled to capacity that I find I have to make decisions in the moment about what to do. And that always leads to bad decisions being made. If I have learned anything by now it is that I should have all of my material ready for learning when I am in a “sprint”. Having to think about what to do kills productivity. And since I already have a structure and routine built up around Italian, It’s far easier to follow through with that language. As a result, the others get neglected. I suppose I just have to start adding something small and simple into my daily routine. Personally, I don’t see how people whose job does not revolve around the languages they speak are able to maintain more than two foreign languages. It baffles my mind. Over the next few months, I am just going to have to decide if Portuguese, Italian, Irish and Basque are just too much for me and maybe I need to be more realistic about my goals and prune some of them.

I came to Italian with a high degree of proficiency in Portuguese. I tried very hard to ensure that my tutors or language partners never spoke English with me in my lessons. As a result, listening comprehension has always been one of my strongest skills. But how would I do things if I had to do them all over again? And what would I change if I had to do them all over again but without the knowledge of Portuguese?

The second scenario is really hard for me to address. It’s hard for me to imagine a world where I don’t know Portuguese. I’ve spoken it for close to half of my life now. This is what I have come up with for the first 90 days.

1. I would take the first 90 days slowly and pay a lot of attention to my pronunciation. I am a firm believer that you must start speaking almost immediately. Learn basic phrases like “how do you say….” and “I’m sorry but I don’t understand.” Then pick a basic resource that is mapped to the CEFR level A1 that you can use with a tutor and start putting a lot of emphasis on listening and speaking.

2. Use Primo Ascolto every single day. Complete the exercise and then go back to it and make sure all of the new vocabulary and sentences that you find interesting are added to Anki or some sort of spaced repetition system. Use the transcription of the audio by shadowing the speaker. Listen to a phrase, pause the recording, repeat trying to imitate the native speaker. Do this until you feel confident that your speech is as close to the native’s as it is going to be. A couple times a week use the audio as dictation. Go back to a previous lesson, listen to the audio again, and transcribe what is being said.

3. At the end of the 90 days try taking an A1 CILS practice exam. Organize a lesson with your tutor on iTalki and simulate the oral exam. Then, on your own, try to simulate as closely as possible the conditions for the rest of the exam in one go. Print all the pages, set timers, and ensure you are not interrupted. Use these results to help guide your learning for the next 90 days. If you did not pass (and be very strict on your grading), look at which section of the exam was the most difficult and work with your tutor on a plan for improvement.

4. At this point, you should have an idea of how to learn a language in a structured but mostly self-guided way. I want you to commit to actually taking the CILS B1 exam in a set timeframe. If you passed the A1 exam, make it one year. If you did not, then a year and a half. No excuses. You will not be able to schedule the exam until it is just a few months out but you must commit to the date.

I wish that I had taken the B2 exam in my first year of studies. I would have made a lot more progress much more quickly with a firm goal. When I finally fixed the date for my C1 exam I became completely focused and made more progress than I would have thought imaginable in such a short period of time for being at an advanced level. People talk about hitting an intermediate plateau, but I shot right past it. I did, however, spend nearly a year at the B2 level doing close to nothing due to lack of focus and issues that arose at work. The fact is, I could have managed the problems better and retained focus if I had had shorter-term goal like the B2 CILS exam.

This brings me to what I would have done differently if I had to do it all over again but retain my knowledge of another Romance language. As I mentioned above, the very first thing would have been scheduling and taking a B1 or B2 exam before taking the C1 or perhaps the C2. I really feel that the wasted 9 months that I mentioned in the paragraph above set me back more than just the time that I didn’t study as assiduously as I could have. I also lost ground in that time. I realized during a language exchange, the only speaking practice I had during the period, that my speaking ability had degraded substantially in comparison to my partner’s level of English. When we started, he was only slightly more advanced than I was. By the time I realized what was going on, he was clearly an entire CEFR level ahead of me. Here is my breakdown of other things I would change and I should note that these strategies can be used by intermediate learners who don’t have a background in another Romance language and numbers 1 and 3 likely apply to beginners as well.

1. I’d abandon Memrise and stick with Anki. Memrise was a great help and I love it still but it lacks the flexibility that I need. I tried hard to make more advanced types of exercises in Memrise but it was always trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I am a strong proponent of cloze exercises and those are just impossible with Memrise.

2. I would take a more structured approach to vocabulary acquisition. I’d start with an intermediate word list of some sort and start working on adding those to my vocab using Anki and Reverso. I would not, however, attempt to use Anki to learn higher frequency words. It’s just not worth it unless you are having trouble remembering specific vocab. Higher frequency problem words can go into your deck, but adding verbs like diventare to SRS is simply creating busy work for yourself. You will see and use this word nearly everyday in your studies.

3. I’d record my lessons and actually review them. I never managed to get myself to do this as regularly as I should have and I think it’s important. This is the single hardest thing to do as a learner. Obviously, something I would not change is doing these lessons and language exchanges on a weekly basis at the least.

4. I’d memorize or mostly memorize monologues or pieces of text from audiobooks or listening exercises. I don’t mean memorize it cold to the point that I can perform it like an actor but to where I can recite it with some prompting. I’d use this to focus on proper diction and to improve my speaking skills. In our native languages, we have sections of speech that we reuse regularly. These set phrases only need to be seen in the contexts in which they are used by natives and then memorized. I was learning these types of set phrases far too late in the game.

5. I would make my own cloze exercises using articles that I read with a focus on verb tenses and adverbial phrases and adverbs of different types (allora, anziché, purtroppo, etc). I started doing this when I got serious about prepping for the CILS exam and I think that of all the work I did for the exam, this had the most impact on my productive language skills (speaking and writing).

The five items listed above all have a common theme running through them that isn’t readily apparent: meta-learning. They all require me to choose examples of natively produced language and use them to produce my own learning materials. The fundamental strategies of language learning are not complex or difficult but the daily tactical choices that we make of how we go about carrying out those strategies can be quite complicated and we need to manage them in a way that is both clear and timely. All advanced learners come to a point where they must begin to take charge of their own learning, learn methods for evaluating their own weaknesses, and produce materials that are specifically targeted for those weaknesses. I have known this for years but putting it into practice consistently has always been challenging and if I am honest with myself this is where I have failed the most as a learner over the past year. So, this is it. August is coming up fast and I am offered a chance to use my knowledge to make my learning more efficient, more durable and more focused. And I think I need another goal. Maybe I will schedule the C2.

About a month and a half before writing this I took my CILS C1 exam. I opted for C1 because I really did not feel that my speaking abilities were up to scratch. I still have not received my results and likely will not for another month or so, but I have decided that it’s time for me to sit down and make a plan for the next six months with some specifics regarding the next 90 days. I have been way too lazy for the past two weeks and I need to get moving before the ground that I gained in the preparation for the exam is lost. But I also want to resurrect my Portuguese, which has gone mostly dormant, and at the same time recover my Irish while learning a bit of Basque. I think that I can do it if I put things into their proper perspective and ensure that my goals with Basque are very long-term.

Lets start with Italian. I want to really work on my understanding of grammar and ensure that I have no more holes in it. I can’t say that I have any true holes at this point but there are some areas of grammar that I simply have never had much use for and for which my explicit knowledge is not very solid. The use of the imperative is an example. I can give commands that one might commonly give as an adult to other adults like, wait just a moment, or let me see… But if I had to actually teach the imperative to a beginner, I would not feel confident at all. By this point, I should. In addition to polishing my grammatical knowledge, I will be working on improving my speech and pronunciation and using the book Leggere, scrivere, argomentare: Prove ragionate di scrittura. My primary methodology is going to be using custom created cloze exercises or the type that I used in preparing for the CILS exam. I take some articles from Italian magazines like Focus and L’Espresso, paste the text into Word and then I remove specific classes of words. This way I am able to practice my ability to use adverbial phrases, verb tenses, vocabulary, etc. and compare my usage to that of a native speaker.

Portuguese is going to be a little more passive at least initially. My primary goal is just reviving my vocabulary and passive skills of reading and listening comprehension. I know that my knowledge is mostly still there, it just needs to be activated. Once I know if I actually passed the CILS exam, I can make better plans regarding lessons and language exchanges. If I did not pass the CILS, though, it will not progress much past this as so much of my time will have to be focused on the retake.

With Irish, I will be spending my time on the text of Learning Irish. I have started working with a native speaker on iTalki and Irish has really always been my first love. Again, my primary focus for the next 90 days is going to be relearning what I already knew. Not having achieved more than a B1 level in my passive skills with Irish, the ground that I lost over the past few years is quite vast. It won’t take me long to reconquer what I knew, but still, time is time.

With all the work above, I cannot hope to make much progress in Basque. My primary objective is going to be taking it slow with the Assimil course on my own and Bakarka with a native on iTalki.

I had wanted to get serious again in the middle of July, but it has not been in the cards. Complications at work and poor sleep have kept me to doing the bare minimum of study. I also did not prepare my materials before the time when my sprint should have started. In order to get things back on track I’ll have to take the last week of July to prepare my materials for the first two weeks of August. I’m honestly really excited to start writing more in Italian and really working on my diction in a way that I just wasn’t able to when preparing for the CILS. If you have read any of my blog posts for the past few years, you’ll know that getting myself to write has always been a challenge regardless of the language. That’s why my blog entries are sporadic. In prepping for the exam, though, I got into a nice groove and want to get back to that with an stronger emphasis on revising my work. For Italian, I mean. If you are reading this, you are stuck with a never-ending stream of rough drafts. But I am fairly certain that not even my mom reads it, so I don’t have to worry too much.

In 2001, 17 software developers met and wrote a manifesto describing a lightweight software development methodology known as Agile. In the following decade, this methodology had a huge impact on the software development world. It was a departure from the typical methodologies of the time. It emphasized individuals, working software, and collaborating with the customer to ensure that changing ideas about what the customer needed could be taken into account so that the right thing was built the first time. You might wonder what the heck that has to do with language learning and you’d be right to. You see, I think that many of the same philosophies and ideas that are the cornerstone of Agile Software Development can actually be adopted by the individual language learner. I also believe that they represent the best method for organizing, tracking, and verifying both the learning process in general and the individual skills language learners need to develop to achieve their goals. Here is my manifesto for Agile Language Learning:

Value people and interactions over process and habits, processes and habits over goals, and goals over materials/tools.

Self-testing has helped me figure out that I my most challenging topic in Italian grammar is the application of the trapassato prossimo within the context of a text. While I am writing or speaking, knowing when to use it is generally quite easy. Or at least it seems to be. But when I do practice exams that require filling in the blanks of a text with the proper conjugation (person and tense) of the verb, I consistently fail. This can only mean one thing: I have a much worse understanding of the distinction between the verb tenses than I actually think that I do. I'm over estimating my ability and only become aware of this problem by consistently testing myself on all areas of the language and taking the time to think.

The retrospective period is a fundamental part of how I learn anything now. I've taken this from the Agile Software Framework that we use at work. Essentially I designate a period of time where I don't do as much studying. This gives me time to relax and let "diffuse mode" learning sink in while I do some self-testing and prepare my resources for my next intense round of learning.

Based on my evaluation of the mistakes I have been making I only have some minor problems distinguishing between when to use the passato prossimo and l'imperfetto so I really need to focus some attention up front on the trapassatto prossimo with some standard study and exercises. Then, I have some PDFs of various magazine articles that I have been slowly taking two or three paragraphs from and replacing conjugated verbs with their infinitive forms. I'll publish these at some point but as it stands right now, my time is quite contained with the exam specific prep period coming up in only a few months. I really need to fill in gaps in my learning before then.

Over the weekend, I completed a large number of flashcards to refresh my vocabulary. I also completed lessons 27 and 26 of Ascolto Avanzato missing only 1 point on lesson 26 and with a perfect score on 27. I also had a language exchange session with roughly 40 minutes of Italian.

Listening comprehension, as has always been the case for me, is one of my strongest skills in Italian. I also completed two letters. The first was a letter of complaint and the second “autocandidatura” for work. I think the way that I have chosen to go about the letter writing is pretty useful for people who are primarily self-directed learners without a full-time instructor that will correct their writing.

1. Find a large number of example letters that cover the general types found on the exam. I did this via a Google search, specifically Google Images. These don’t have to be prefect but they should be written by native speakers. As long as a letter is a letter of complaint, it does not matter what the specific topic or complaint happen to be about.

2. Ensure that you have at least two examples of each type of letter from the exam that meet the criteria of what you would expect to find on the exam. Total, though, you should have at least five examples of each type with two being very close to what you’d expect from the test.

3. Begin your studies by copying the letters by hand word-for-word into a notebook. Start with a specific type (domanda di lavoro, for example) and copy all of the examples you have.

4. Once you have copied them, go to a resource that actually teaches techniques for writing a formal letter and make sure you understand how the material taught relates to the examples you have copied.

5. Pick out the examples you have found that relate most closely to the exam and blank out some of the key phrases that you have found common in the learning material as well as the example letters you have found. Give yourself no less than three days and no more than five days and then re-copy the letters filling in the blanks that you created.

6. Then repeat step five again. Blank out even more of the letter and then give yourself at least seven days but no more than 10 and recopy the letters filling in all of the blank you have created in the letter. For clarity, you should keep the blanks from step five and add additional blanks.

7. At this point, you should feel pretty comfortable with the structure of a formal letter. Go back to the learning material and complete any exercises that are given. You should also take a few examples form the test and attempt to complete them as you would be required to in the exam: pen and paper only! Only then should you type them out and post them to a language forum or service like Lang8.

Happy learning!

My OneNote notebook with material for this component of the exam: Lettere

Today I took a TELC B2 practice test which is quite easier than the CILS exam for the same level. In order to increase the difficulty I the initial 3 sections of the exam giving my self only about 2/3 of the time alloted for the first section of the test. I scored 176 points out of a possible 180. Unfortunately I was interrupted before I could complete the written piece of the exam. I'll need to continue that later.

I also wrote a letter asking for information and completed lesson 28 of Ascolto Avanzato with a perfect score. I have yet to have the letter corrected.

In addition to the above, I completed a large number of flashcards for vocabulary.

After roughly 9 months of wasted time due to demands at work, I’m getting back in the saddle with my Italian studies. I have set the money aside for the CILS exam, I am still debating if I will take C2 or C1, but I expect it to be scheduled and set in stone within the next month.

Yesterday I got in touch with two teachers to get my exam prep back on course. With the first, my aim is to work primarily on the section for the monolog. I’ll be sending her two sound files each week that are 3 to 4 minutes in length and are either taken directly from past exams or are based closely on the type of material covered by this section of the exam. With the second teacher, I intend on covering the first section of the oral exam. This section is more difficult because it requires managing an interaction for which the candidate cannot possibly be prepared. If you had asked me about this section of the exam about a year ago, I would have said that I believe that the candidate needs to be familiar with a very broad section of situations and able to manage them all with a high degree of confidence. But, I have changed my views on this section after considerable thought on the types of situations I have seen in previous exams. They are far too varied for anyone to be able to handle any specific situation with any real degree of precision. Instead, I believe that the important thing, the skill actually being tested, is one’s ability to manage unpredictability and unfamiliar situations in Italian. If you can’t prepare for specific situations presented in the test, what can you do to best prep for this section? There does seem to be a certain amount of uniformity in the types of interactions that you will find:

1. Inquiring/complaining client: The candidate is the customer/client and has questions about a product/service or some sort of problem. You might need a refund, have a complaint about something that happened to you, or need to ask if the product can do X or work with Y. The roles may also be reversed.

2. Professional service/Interview: The candidate must assume the role of a business owner, consultant, or job seeker that is meeting with a potential client/boss to work out the details of some sort of business deal or job interview.

3. Academic career: The candidate takes on the role of a student who is requesting something from a professor that s/he may or may not know. This might range from asking for the professor to assist you on your thesis or to allow you to attend a course though you may not have the full requirements.

4. Civil services: The candidate will take the role of a person who needs to interface with some sort of civil service. This could be anything like renewing your permission to stay in Italy, discovering that you are the victim of a robbery and need to contact the police, or that you are suddenly sick and am ambulance has been called.

Immediately you should notice that all of these situations require ample use of the formal Lei. You absolutely must feel comfortable with it. After that, the important thing here is to find linguistic steppingstones that you can use as markers and that can give you precious moments to think about where you want to direct the conversation. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to look at the situations above and create a mind map in your native language of short, generic phrases that you feel would be useful in such situations. Avoid the urge to get hyper-specific. The purpose of this is not to memorize sentences that you think you will be able to use; you’re taking a C-level exam! The purpose is to find some stock phrases and expressions that you can use to fill space and transition from the unknown to the known. Then make sure you can use equivalent forms of those expressions in Italian.

Imagine that you are asked to assume the role of a person who wants to rent a booth at a trade show for the industry that your company operates in. You have no clue how to do this. I wouldn’t even know what would be expected of me of this situation in English. Well, no problem. Who would know about this sort of thing? The VP of marketing, not you. You’re the owner. What are phrases that you might use in a professional setting where you lack the required knowledge to operate at high level professionally?

You’ll have to excuse me, I don’t usually…..

Can you help me understand what is required to…?

And how exactly does one go about…?

So, if I’ve understood….

Notice that these phrases are in no way concretely related to the idea of renting a booth at a trade show. All they do is help you drive the situation from areas where you lack knowledge to where you can get the information you need to say something intelligent and demonstrate that you not only understand but that you can manage the interaction. You are not being tested on your knowledge of trade shows in Italy. Let that stuff fade into the background and focus on how you’d handle the situation in real-life: requesting information, ensuring you have understood, and then moving the interaction on to the next step.

Things to avoid:

1. Apologizing a lot for linguistic errors. This is counterproductive. Forget the mistake and move on unless it has impeded understanding. You said the wrong word? You do that in your native language, too. Behave as you would if it were your native language.

2. Focusing on details related to the scenario. The creators of the exam have stated that the scenarios should not get in the way of the evaluation of the candidate’s linguistic abilities. Chances are that the examiner is not going to feel 100% comfortable in the scenario; they will not focus on the details of the scenario so you certainly shouldn’t! Instead, work with your tutor to find ways to manage interactions where you aren’t an expert in the thing being discussed.

3. Preparing for specific scenarios. You won’t get them on the test. Just forget about it. Prepare for as many varied situations as you can find in the quaderni for previous exams. Do each once and move on to something else.

4. Automatically picking the easy one. An interaction at a shop between a sales clerk and customer might seem B2, but unless you are super confident in talking about clothing, colors, and prices you might be better off picking something that appears more difficult on the surface. Learn the types of scenarios that tend to be hardest for you and, during the exam, pick something that isn’t that. You should still make sure you try to improve your ability to deal with challenging situations while you are preparing for the test, but once you’re taking the exam always choose what you know will allow you best to put your skills on display. There are no extra points for picking the hardest scenario.

I’ve decided that while I continue to work on Italian, I’m going to allow myself to take some time to look at some of the less studied Romance languages. Having a working knowledge of the Ibero-Romance languages for more than 20 years, learning Italian intensively really highlighted my lack of knowledge of the language family and how it was skewed by my familiarity with only Portuguese, Galician, and Spanish. In an effort to satisfy my passion for minority languages, I’ve decided on picking up Catalan, Piedmontese, Romanian, and Sardinian to a B1 level. Most importantly, though, I’m going to take the time to make a comparison of them and perhaps dig into the transition from Vulgar Latin to Proto-Romance and then to the modern languages. Once thing that has made me very sad about my selection is that Occitan is not on the list. I’ve not been able to find a single native or fluent heritage speaker willing to teach it even informally. From what I have gathered from academic material published on the Internet it is all but moribund. Since its relationship with Catalan is similar to that of Brazilian Portuguese to Galician, I decided to give it a try instead. Catalan’s language community is very strong and very proud and there are a lot of resources available on the web as well as teachers and informal tutors on iTalki. For Piedmontese, Sardinian, and Romanian I’ll be learning through Italian so as to be sure that I do not get to distracted from my current plan of study.

As of this week I have been very happy with my performance on the CILS B2 practice exams so I have decided it’s time to start prepping specifically for the material on the C level tests. The format for the higher level exams does differ from the format of the intermediate levels and these changes can be really intimidating the first time you encounter them. But like anything else, the more you confront similar tasks, the less stressed you’ll feel during the test and the better you will be able to evaluate your own performance after taking the actual exam.

It’s almost the middle of September and I’m very excited because I’ve finally progressed to the point where I can speak for a few minutes on a familiar topic. I would still not place my speech at the B2 level but I’m nearly there. My reading ability has absolutely skyrocketed. I’ve been reading a book called Geografia Italian per Stranieri and I don’t even realize I’m reading in Italian. There may be one or two words I need to look up in each chapter. I’ve also gone back to Io Non Ho Paura and feel I understand the vast majority of it now. There may be a few words per page that I’m unsure of or need to look up. All-in-all, I feel my progress over 9 months has been substantial. I’m feeling fresh, I’ve revamped my study habits and fall is upon us.

This means that it’s time for another 90 day challenge. This one will go from October to December and I’m really excited about this one because it’s going to include frequenting the Italian course offered by School Amici in Cincinnati. Thanks to Reddit, I’ve found some strategies that have been helping me get past my bad habits that I feel have been holding me back the most. If you’ve been following my progress you know that I have always had issues writing frequently, reviewing my lessons, and organizing/preparing for my lessons. In my last post, I mentioned the Reddit user who studied for and passed the C2 exam for Italian in 2 years. I got 2 very good ideas from him that I have already integrated into my routine that have helped me immensely: using videos from EuroNews to write the transcript for or a summary of short videos and giving a 3 minute monologue in my lessons.

Writing the transcript or summary has been helpful because I do it with pen and paper only. Then I can look back at the transcript provided by the video and ensure that I am not consistently misspelling any words. It also helps improve my listening comprehension as well as boosting my vocabulary.

The 3 minute monologue has helped because I simply cannot do it if I have not done some sort of preparation. I’m learning set phrases, conversational connectors, and finding chronic issues in grammar and pronunciation all of which give me the required motivation to go back and review my lessons.

This will be my study routine for the Fall Language Challenge.

Using Memrise to add another few thousand words to my vocab. I’m doing Memrise daily.

Using EuroNews videos every day to boost my writing.

2 conversation lessons per week with monologues. I’m not quite certain that I will be able to maintain 2 lessons like this per week but I am going to try.

The School Amici class, which will certainly have homework/exercises at the B2 level. I am excited that I placed in the upper-intermediate class.

Using Ascolto Avvansato 3 times per week to help my listening comprehension.

Extensive Reading with books like Geografia Italiana.

Every other weekend I want to take a B2 or C1 practice exam. If I am lucky, I’ll be able to pass one of the C1 practice exams by December.

I definitely consider my summer language challenge to have been a success. I increased my vocabulary by over 700 words (that's just based on my Memrise/Anki work) and gained a much better working knowledge of the fundamentals of Italian grammar. Unfortunately, though, I feel it ended with a whimper. I lost steam on the last couple of weeks and combined with a death in my family I basically did almost nothing in the final week. I certainly did nothing productive! And what's worst, it was the first week since I started studying Italian that I did not have a conversation with a native speaker in Italian only. But that's what happens when the reality of life intrudes on your goals.

I want to start this post with the caveat that I believe simple vocabulary based flashcards are less efficient than full sentences. The reason why I believe this is the same reason that mnemonic techniques like memory palaces work for memorizing facts and other information. The added situational context and detail makes forgetting less easy. And yes, I phrased it that way intentionally. It doesn't make remembering easier, it makes forgetting less easy. And to be clear, what I do not mean is that context-based learning of vocabulary is superior to simply using a flash card. The science on this topic is clear: in the long run there is no significant difference in retention of vocabulary learned contextually as compared to vocabulary learned via memorization and refreshed using spaced repetition. But there is a difference in short term memory retention between these two classes. What this shows is that a combined approach of context-based learning with spaced repetition for review is preferable for enhancing short and long-term gains in learning. So simply combining a list-based vocabulary Memrise course with extensive reading and listening can have a nearly exponential effect on vocabulary acquisition in the short and long terms.

And now, to the point. I've found a series of courses based on the book Using Italian Vocabulary that I think is very applicable to students studying at the B levels. The problem is they seem to be somewhat scattered. The Memrise user abilegge has created a huge subset of courses on the book but it seems she may have left some of the words out. Another user, arbor151, has created fewer courses but it seems like those courses are more complete. I have compiled them here and I will be creating the remaining courses once I get to them. Even though I have marked most of these as B2+, much of the vocabulary is applicable to a B1 level student but the vast majority is probably too much. My suggestions is that if you are studying at the B1 level, you should really pay attention to the levels in each course because your time might be better spent elsewhere. If you are confidently speaking and writing at the B1 level and you are ambitious, go ahead and get started.

Update: Another excellent course that focuses more on phrases and expressions than vocabulary is 1100 Intermediate Expressions. It currently has more than 1250 items and was added to as late as July, 2017. This course has actually become the core of my SRS studies in 2017. Statuses above are up-to-date as of 2017/08/02.

I'm close to the half-way point of my summer Italian language challenge for 2015 and I feel that so far it's been very successful. I feel like I have a very good handle on most of the grammar topics for B1 and a good deal of the vocabulary as well. I think I need to spend a little more time with vocabulary regarding health and illness. This just has not been an area of much interest for me up to this point. I've been pretty successful in increasing the amount of writing that I am doing and this week I turned in 4 assignments for correction. I need to do my best to keep that pace up in the coming weeks as well as make a full transition to not using any sort of assistance in my writing; just a pen and paper.

Despite the victory I consider increasing my written output in Italian, I have not been reviewing my lessons and I am noticing more and more that there are certain words that I am consistently mispronouncing. This has to be fixed. It would go a long way to help my fluency if I didn't have consistent issues with words that seem to come up regularly.

My 3 usual tutors have all been helping me immensely during my challenge (Laura, Daniele, and Salvatore). I've also been collecting a lot of examples of grammatical structures for the B1 level in a Memrise course.

CEFR B1 Italian Supplement - CILS TELC

I'm only about 1/2 way through with it but it already has 672 full sentences in it. I'm trying to get to the point were each grammatical structure has close to 300 or 400 examples. I suspect that it will be well over 2000 sentences by the time I'm done with the B1 specific grammar topics. I think by the time I'm ready to start specifically preparing for my CILS exam, I'll have created a corresponding course for A level Italian (a single course for A1 and A2) as well as a B2 level course. If I am lucky, this will mean that I'll have put in enough work to be able to consider sitting the C1 examination next summer.

The vast majority of language learners never escape the advanced beginner and lower intermediate levels in their target language (CEFR A2 and B1 levels). This plateau represents the first real hurdle to fluency and most students simply give up after floundering for a few months. Others continue studying but never make any real progress and seem eternally stuck at somewhere between a high B1 and a low B2, never really becoming conversationally fluent. My suggestion for breaking past this plateau is based on my studies for CILS, an Italian CEFR examination, and talking with other language learners. Like any good technique for breaking past a plateau, no matter if it’s language learning or weight lifting, it requires a highly-focused, concerted effort on the hardest aspect of the skill you wish to improve.

I'm on my fifth day of my June, 2015 Italian Language Challenge and I wanted to give an update now because some of my parameters have changed since my original post (surprise, surprise). First off, I have not been using Magari like I expected but I've found two other resources that are a little better for someone who is self-studying. The first is called Parola a Te! It covers each of Italy's ragioni and discusses aspects of history, literiture, and culture that are important to each ragione. I also has both audio and video companions that can be found on the book's web site. The other book is Il Rifugio Segreto: Letture Semplificate. This also comes with a CD but what I like most about it is that it matches my reading and listening level really well and includes explanations of vocabulary from the texts in Italian.

The biggest change, though, has been working with my iTalki tutor Laura. She's been kind enough to take on some daily tasks and lesson prep work for the cost of a couple of extra hours of lessons. Every night I send her a report of what I have done that day and she corrects any exercises for which I don't have the answer key as well as correcting any writing that I have done. It's a huge commitment because I don't take days off. There might be days when I can't do as much as I want to, but I make an effort to get some Italian study in every single day. So far, just knowing that she has an expectation of me is helping to keep my on task and I feel like I have made more progress in the past 5 days than I did in all of May. That's not to say I didn't make any progress in May, I did. I was just kind of aimless and a lack of focus always leads to less progress than learning with a clear goal.

Two of my three big complaints about my learning process have been addressed with this arrangement: I'm writing more and I'm prepping for my lessons. The final one is really up to me, though. I really believe in doing learning retrospectives to take new vocabulary and structures from your online lessons and add them to Anki or Memrise or whatever spaced-repetition system you use. Without doing this so much learning slips through your fingers because you are so focused on the act of participating in the conversation there is no chance you will remember which grammatical structures you got wrong or which vocabulary words you are mispronouncing. If I can maintain this level and quality of work, I am really sure that I can make it to B2 by the end of August, 2015.